Space Toys

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Mel Brooks had Spaceballs (a Star Wars parody); I have Space Toys.

I’m not kidding. One way to bring Choreutics to life is with good geometrical models. Whenever I’m in a toy shop (or the children’s section of a museum shop), I’m always on the lookout for the newest geometrical toys.

To be honest, I’m always on the lookout. At the moment, geometrical forms are fashionable as decorative items. I just went to Hobby Lobby to buy pastel paper and walked out with a stellated icosahedron….

In “Bringing Choreutics to Life” I will share some of my “finds.” I will also show participants how to make models out of inexpensive materials.

Come play with my space toys.

Find out more….

The Octa Is Coming

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In July, the Octa workshop, “Bringing Choreutics to Life” takes Laban’s space harmony theory into practice. This three-day workshop presents key Choreutic concepts in a way that is accessible for participants new to Laban’s ideas as well as experienced movement analysts.

Laban himself admitted that “our mental functions employ geometrical symbols to express orientation in space, but generally our feeling does not comprehend living movement within geometrical plasticity.” In other words, both understanding and embodying choreutics can be steep learning curve!

I ought to know. I’ve been teaching choreutics for over 30 years. While I love the material, I am keenly aware that many students struggle. In the Octa, I plan to demonstate a variety of ways to present Choreutics and to make it lively and meaningful.

Find out more….

The Tetra Takes Off

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Twenty-one brave readers on four continents began the Tetra seminar, Decoding Laban’s Choreutics on March 26^th. This “great books” correspondence course is focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, also known as The Language of Movement.

Over a six-week period, we are exploring the book two chapters at a time. I use the word “exploring” purposefully, for I see this course as a journey of discovery for all twenty-two of us.

It is certainly proving to be a journey of discovery for me. As the guide, I have two tasks. First, I assign questions to provide a focus for each reading assignment. Secondly, I write a commentary on the assigned reading. These commentaries provide background information to help illuminate Laban’s thinking, link themes that recur across chapters, and, in some cases, clarify what Laban appears to be saying.

I have always found some parts of the book to be mystifying. I don’t expect to be able to dispel all the mysteries. However, I am finding that some confusion is due to errors, particularly in the illustrations and notations that accompany them. Perhaps someday an edition of this significant theoretical work can be published with an errata sheet!

For the moment, it is enough to have thoughtful companions and interesting exchange of views as the Tetra takes off.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #2

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

As an artist-scientist, Laban is concerned not only with the geometry of movement, but also with its expressive meaning. This dual vision gives rise to his theory of natural affinities between lines of motion and effort qualities.

Laban’s working out of these correlations, introduced in Choreutics in Chapter 3, is intriguing but not entirely original. The expressive value of line and form has its roots in theory of empathy propounded by late 19^th and early 20^th century psychologists and art theorists.

According to the theory of empathy, we project our visceral and kinesthetic feelings into the objects we perceive. In order to be expressive, the art object must possess certain formal qualities, but it need not be represent anything in particular.

Art Nouveau artist August Endell went on to spell out the empathic reactions aroused by various kinds of lines. Straight and curved lines, narrow and wide lines, short and long lines, and the direction of the line were all correlated with various sensations. For example, length or shortness of a line are functions of time, while the thickness and thinness are functions of tension.

I’ve been unable to find a full description of Endell’s system, but it seems to me that the germ of Laban’s theory of effort affinities can be linked back to his days as an Art Nouveau artist. The fact that effort notation postdates the development of direction symbols suggests that Laban may have assumed that the movement dynamics were inherent in the spatial form.

Want more clues for deepening your understanding of Laban’s theories? Register for “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #1

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Another example of Laban’s double vision is his concept of the kinesphere and dynamosphere as dual domains of human movement. To represent both domains, Laban utilizes the cube.

Decoding Choreutics via Movescape

With regard to the kinesphere, Laban uses the cube quite literally. Its corners, edges, and internal diagonals serve as a kind of longitude and latitude for mapping movement in the space around the dancer’s body.

With regard to the dynamosphere, Laban uses the cube formally to represent patterns of effort change. This shift in how the model should be interpreted is complicated further by Laban’s use of direction symbols to stand for effort qualities and combinations.

When Laban wrote Choreutics in 1938-39, the effort symbols had not yet been created. Consequently, his dual use of direction symbols to stand in for effort obscures the discussion, but not entirely.

To decode the models discussed in Chapters 3, 6, and 9, it is only necessary to translate the direction symbols into effort qualities and combinations. Once this is done, Laban’s discussion of dynamospheric patterns becomes clear.

Want more keys? Register for the correspondence course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

“God Geometricizes….” Said Madame Blavatsky

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Artistic and scientific circles were not the only circles that overlapped in the fin de siècle period. European artists of the period were also involved in various secret spiritual societies that flourished in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

For example, the painter Wassily Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy, one of the occult spiritual movements of the period, and one that was very attractive to artists. As religious historian Mircea Eliade notes, avant garde European artists “utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”

Novel spiritual practices were not merely a form of rebellion for the European avant garde. The occult revival also gave artists new ways to think about the nature of art as it moved beyond representation and symbolism toward formalism and abstraction. Kandinsky drew upon precepts of Theosophy, such as the quote above by Theosophy guru, Madame Blavatsky, to theorize a spiritual visual art composed of only form and color. By these means alone, Kandinsky wrote, the artist could “cause vibrations in the soul.”

Laban was also attracted to the occult. During his career as a painter (1899- 1919), he supposedly associated with three esoteric groups: the Free Masons, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Rosicrucians. The extent of Laban’s involvement is a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, in Choreutics, his treatise on the geometry of human movement, Laban does acknowledge that his subject “necessitates a certain spiritual emphasis.”

What does this mean? Find out more in the correspondence course, “Decoding Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Keeping Together in Time

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Moving rhythmically, in sync with others, is a peculiar human pleasure. “Muscular bonding” is the term William McNeill has coined to describe “the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among participants.”

McNeill, a military historian, became interested in muscular bonding as he reflected on his own Army experiences of prolonged marching in close order drill. He recalled that “moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large.” He concluded that keeping together in time by marching, dancing, singing, or chanting rhythmically provides a basis for group cohesion, one that has been of great evolutionary value — for rigorous selection favors groups that are in synch with one another.

Anthropologist Edward Hall concurs, noting “it can now be said with assurance that individuals are dominated in their behavior by complex hierarchies of interlocking rhythms.” Hall undertook a program of interethnic research in northern New Mexico, where three cultures (Native American, Spanish American, and Anglo-American) intermingle. He filmed various interactions and used frame-by-frame technology to analyze the films. “Unfolding before my eyes was a perpetual ballet,” he recalls. “Each culture was choreographed in its own way, with its own beat, tempo, and rhythm.”

Synchrony has also been discovered at the individual level by nonverbal researcher William Condon. Through painstaking frame-by-frame analysis of filmed conversations, Condon discovered a “oneness and unity between speech and bodily motion in normal behavior, ” a phenomenon he called self synchrony. Moreover, Condon found that when people converse, there is not only self synchrony but also interpersonal synchrony. Entrainment is the term he coined for the process that occurs when two or more people become engaged in each other’s rhythms, meshing like gears in Swiss watch.

Whether at the macro-level of muscular bonding or the micro-level of subtle entertainment, euphoric group feeling and interpersonal rapport depend upon these subtle rhythms of keeping together in time.

Movement Traits and Movement Factors

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Warren Lamb‘s assessments of movement patterns draws upon principles established by the movement expert Rudolf Laban and the management consultant F.C. Lawrence. During the Second World War, these two men collaborated to enhance efficiency in British factories.

Their revolutionary approach utilized “trait and factor” theory in the following way. First, they identified the movement factors required for a given job. Next, they analyzed the movement traits of individual workers, based on observing each person’s movement patterns. Finally, Laban and Lawrence determined the degree to which an individual worker’s personal movement style matched the job requirements.

This procedure allowed Laban and Lawrence to sort workers into three categories. When the worker’s movement traits matched the motion factors of a job, he/she continued to do the job. When the worker’s movement patterns only partially matched what was needed to function efficiently, the worker was given movement training. When the worker’s traits did not match the job, the worker was given a different function more in harmony with his/her movement style.

For example, Laban observed one man whose assembly line task required a lot of rapid action that did not match the fellow’s movement preferences. In fact, he complained almost continuously, and this irritated his co-workers. Laban moved him to a slower paced job, one that required more precision and craftsman-like care. The man stopped complaining and his social relations with the other workers also improved.

Following the Second World War, Warren Lamb studied with Laban and collaborated with both Laban and Lawrence, becoming thoroughly grounded in the principles and procedures they had established. When Lamb began to work independently as a consultant, he followed the same procedures. He carefully analyzed the movement traits/movement patterns of the candidate, established the action factors of the job and based his advice on the extent to which the candidate was a good match.

Lamb gradually began to elaborate on the principles he had absorbed from his training with Laban and Lawrence. He recognized that, while everyone has to do his job, each person has more aptitude for some parts than for others. This led Lamb to approach his individual assessments according to the following convictions:

Each person has a distinctive movement pattern.
We should try to act in accordance with our movement preferences.
There is no one way of doing a job.
Maybe we can find a new way of doing a job that matches our movement patterns.
If it is impossible to find a way, then we are unsuited to that particular job.

Through disciplined study of authentic individual movement patterns and principled advice, Lamb came to be internationally renowned as a management consultant. Find out what one of Lamb’s clients had to say about the value of his Movement Pattern Analysis profile in the next blog.

Movement Patterns Are Individually Distinctive

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Bodily movement is ephemeral and illusive. Consider a simple action, like lifting the right arm overhead. At the beginning, as the right arm hangs by the side, there is stillness. At the ending when the arm arrives overhead, there is another momentary stillness. But the actual movement, the process of raising the arm, disappears even as it is happening.

Dance, the movement art par excellence, exists at a perpetual vanishing point. Yet, there is order and pattern to dance. The ballerina takes three steps to the right, then three steps to the left, turns and pauses. Here is a pattern, established by the repetition of certain kinds of actions.

There is also a pattern in the everyday movements that accompany speech. These patterns are more diffuse, since they occur spontaneously and without choreographic planning. Nevertheless, a perceptive observer watching someone converse will begin to see that certain movements recur. These repeated actions can be thought of as a kind of nonverbal signature, one that is uniquely characteristic.

This nonverbal signature consists of all kinds of bodily actions – postures, gestures, and posture-gesture mergers. Management consultant Warren Lamb became particularly interested in Posture-Gesture Mergers because he discerned that these body movements were more genuinely expressive than postures and gestures.

Just as individuals are distinct in terms of physical appearance and vocal quality, Lamb found that each person has a unique Posture-Gesture Merger pattern. Identifying this pattern allowed Lamb to predict not only how well a candidate would fit a particular position, but also the extent to which he/she would find the nature of work satisfying. His findings were consistent with the initial discoveries made by Rudolf Laban and F.C. Lawrence. I discuss their discoveries in the next blog.

The Significance of Posture-Gesture Mergers

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

A Posture-Gesture Merger refers to a movement in which the dynamic effort quality and/or shape change is consistent through the body as a whole. Warren Lamb first identified Posture-Gesture Mergers as significant phrases in the ongoing stream of bodily movements that accompany speech. As he observed, “It’s not just Posture and Gesture but the merging element of the two which is the crux of the matter.”

Posture-Gesture Mergers (PGMs) are significant for the following reasons:
1. Unlike static postures, PGMs are dynamic physical actions.
2. Unlike isolated gestures, PGMs are relatively intense in terms of the degree of bodily involvement.
3. Unlike postures and gestures, which can be consciously controlled, PGMs occur spontaneously and are difficult to replicate intentionally.
4. Although PGMs are spontaneous expressions, they recur in patterns that are individually characteristic. Moreover, the PGM pattern is a relatively enduring feature of a person’s movement.

The significance of Posture-Gesture Mergers gave Lamb the key for which he had been looking. Now he had an objective way to discern the candidate’s authentic movement expressions. In my next blog, I discuss how Lamb used this key to unlock the meaning in the individual candidate’s movement patterns.